


The Devourer

by Hoborg



Category: alt.sex.cthulhu(?)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Squick, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-28
Updated: 2011-10-28
Packaged: 2017-10-25 01:16:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoborg/pseuds/Hoborg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some appetites need to be gotten rid of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Main Story

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fixfic upon a probably-original story I read upwards of ten years ago, probably on alt.sex.cthulhu, but I don’t remember for certain and haven’t been able to find it. _That_ was an explicitly sexualized hard-vore tale that ends just about as badly as possible for the protagonist, her family, her friends, and several passers-by. _This_ …not so much.
> 
> Problems Solved is my own invention, as are all the characters except the protagonist, whose name has been changed from the original (because I can’t remember what it was in the original). Nobody’s name is an allusion to anything, but Henry's setting of origin may be familiar to some readers, as may a few of the props and scenery.

The staffer at the intake desk (HOLLY GARCIA, said the name card) had seen far worse than the teenage girl who ran in the door that afternoon, as if she’d lose her nerve if she walked. Hungry; haunted expression; had clearly run some distance; none of these are unusual for an office of Problems Solved. The sign does say WE HELP WHEN NO ONE ELSE CAN. What was unusual was what the girl said:

“It stopped. It _stopped_. I don’t want to eat you.”

Intake staff are trained to take nearly anything in stride; Holly simply said, “What stopped?”

“The _hunger_. Er. I’m still hungry, but it can wait. I don’t have to _fight_ to think of anything else. And, um, everyone I saw on the street outside looked like, like food. _Prey_. You don’t.”

Holly poked at the computer on her desk a little (it did not like what the front door’s automatic scanners had found) and said mildly, “No compulsion can cross the threshold of this office. Your will is your own here. You are safe, and we will find a way to help. I would offer food, but the computer tells me that wouldn’t actually do you any good, so instead try this.” She took a small box from under the desk and pushed it toward the girl, who picked it up and opened it, finding a plain steel ring inside.

“I put this on?”

“Yes. It’s a ring of nutrition. It won’t fill your stomach but it’ll fix your blood sugar and anything else you happen to be low on. Have a seat, catch your breath. Our database is pretty sure it knows what your problem is, but when you’re ready I would like you to describe it in your own words. Also, for the record, what’s your name?”

“Uh, Tricia. Tricia Stone.” The girl looked a little daunted, but she put the ring on and sat in one of the large, friendly chairs opposite the desk. After a few minutes, she said, “I do feel a bit better now.”

Holly nodded. “Are you ready to describe your problem?”

Tricia bit her lip a little. “This may sound hard to believe—”

“I’ve been trained to believe six impossible things before breakfast.”

“Heh. Okay. How far back should I go?”

“As far as you need to make the situation clear. There’s no hurry and no need to summarize.”

Tricia took a deep breath. “Right. Well, it’s the hunger. It _used_ to only happen once or twice a year. Since I was eight? I remember the first time. I was walking home from school and I saw a squirrel—just a regular squirrel—I’d had plenty at lunch but suddenly I _had_ to eat something, and the squirrel, it looked like the most delicious thing in the whole world.”

“So you tried to catch it?”

“I did catch it. It was easy. It didn’t even _try_ to run away, or struggle or bite me. It saw me looking at it and it just… stood there and let me pick it up and put it in my mouth and swallow it. Still alive. And the hunger stopped, just like that.”

Holly tapped at the computer a little more. “And this kept happening, once or twice a year?”

“Right. Once or twice a year I’d have to devour a live squirrel. I made sure nobody ever saw me do it and I thought it was strange but I didn’t know anything I could do about it. Then then it started happening more often and I had to eat … bigger meals. Two or three squirrels in a row, or a couple pigeons or a wild rabbit. Once or twice a month. For most of this year, and it was starting to scare me and I still didn’t know what I could do about it. And then. Yesterday.”

She paused, looking down. Holly made “go on” noises.

“Yesterday I ate a stray dog. A big one. I don’t know how it _fit_ , but it did. I guess I can unhinge my jaw like a python? But it doesn’t seem like there should be room in my _stomach_ either.”

Holly shrugged. “The mechanics are probably not that important. What sounds important is that this compulsion is coming back more often and stronger.”

“Right. I thought a whole _dog_ would hold it for a while but it came back today. Worse than ever. When I was hanging in the back yard with my friend Kath.”

Holly looked serious. “Did you eat her?”

“No. But I _wanted_ to. I wanted to so bad. The only way I could stop myself was to run. I ran through the house and out the front and I grabbed my bicycle and I just _fled_. And it kept getting _worse_. Every person I passed. Prey. If I had stopped I would have eaten someone, anyone, right there, and I wouldn’t have cared if anyone saw me. Maybe I’d have eaten them too.”

“But you didn’t stop. You came here.”

“Just by accident. I took a turn down this street because it looked like there wasn’t anyone on it and then I saw your sign, and I thought, I can’t keep biking forever, but maybe there’s something they can do.”

Holly nodded. “We can do something. The database was right. We’ve seen this before, and we can make it stop.”

Relief flooded Tricia’s face. “What is it? What can you do?”

“You’re under a curse. It’s not your fault, it’s not because of anything you did. If anything it’s your parents’ fault, but I wouldn’t blame them either, because if they hadn’t done what they did, you’d never have been born.”

“… how’s that?”

“There’s an, um, let’s call it a demon. This file has a long footnote about how ‘demon’ is not really the right word, but it’s a supernatural entity that makes deals with people. It gives them something they desperately want, in exchange for what sounds at the time to be a trivial price, but later it turns out it was far too high. I say it quacks like a demon.”

Tricia had to smile a little. “You’re saying my parents made a deal with this demon?”

“Yes. As far as we know, this demon always makes the same deal. It finds couples who can’t have children, have worn themselves out trying, and it says: ‘I will give you a daughter, and all I demand in return is that, when she is grown, she will be my mouth in the world.’ That doesn’t sound like much, does it? In previous incidents, when we’ve found the parents, they usually say they thought the demon meant their child would _speak_ for it. Be its prophet.” Holly shook her head. “You know firsthand what it really means.”

Tricia was nodding. “So it’s the demon who wants to eat people. Through me.”

“Just so. We know of …” she tapped a few keys “… six cases of this curse, plus three unexplained incidents that may have the same cause. In four of the six confirmed cases, the primary victim ate anywhere from two to fifty people and then mysteriously disappeared. In the other two cases, we were able to find the primary victim before she disappeared, and both times we were able to lift the curse. Unfortunately, those victims had already eaten at least one person each.”

“…what did you do with them?”

“I’m afraid they’re both in mental institutions.”

“Is that what will happen to me?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist, but according to this, it was the experience of eating another human being that … left them not in their right minds. You managed not to do that. You may need some psychological treatment when this is all over, and we’ll make sure you get it, but I think you should be able to go back to your life.”

“… that’s really good to hear.”

“As for the curse itself, we have two options for you. We can just take it off, like we did for the other two victims we found. That’s an office procedure—I can’t do it myself, but one of our magicians can come here and do it—takes about half an hour, no effort or discomfort on your part. There is a fee for this option.”

“Um, I don’t have any money on me.”

“We don’t generally charge people money. You would owe us assistance with another person’s problem, once, some time in the future. We would not ask you to do anything that was beyond your abilities, or put you in any sort of danger. However, it would not necessarily be easy, or convenient for you at the time.”

“Huh. Is that what you usually want as payment? And what’s the other option?”

“Mostly, yes. We have a _lot_ of clients and we need all the help we can get. The other option … you didn’t eat any people. That puts you in a, hm, this says ‘privileged moral position.’ With your assistance, one of our magicians can confront and destroy the demon. That would not only lift the curse from you, it would prevent it from falling on anyone else ever again.” Holly held up a hand to stop Tricia from breaking in. “This would take several hours, and I’m to warn you that it will be both physically and emotionally unpleasant, and somewhat dangerous. However, it should not be more difficult for you than what you have already been through, and if you choose this option you will not owe us anything, regardless of outcome.”

Tricia didn’t say anything for a little while, then: “How dangerous exactly?”

“According to this, there is a small risk of death, and a larger risk of ‘significant mental trauma.’ That means, if you survive, you might be spending some time in intensive psych treatment afterward, but you wouldn’t be permanently institutionalized.”

“I… I’m a little scared, but … I don’t want anyone else to have the afternoon I just had. If I can stop it, I’ve got to.”

Holly nodded, and turned back to the computer. “This will take a few minutes to arrange… I should show you a picture of the magician you’ll be working with. His appearance can be a little alarming if you’re not used to it. But he’s saved my life more than once, and I’m confident he can defeat the demon.”

The computer projected a photo on the wall of a man in well-used clothes: tall boots, worn old jacket and jeans. What caught the eye, though, was the pair of short, twisting horns that grew up from his forehead, and the way he towered over the woman standing next to him, who—Tricia blinked in surprise—was clearly Holly herself, only armed to the teeth. “He must be seven feet tall!” she blurted.

“Indeed, seven foot one, not counting the horns,” said Holly. “His name is Henry Sanders. He’s just as human as you or I, but he comes from a parallel Earth where people have more variation in their body shapes. His variety is called ‘trolls.’ This photo was taken about two years ago.”

“What did you need so many _guns_ for?”

Holly chuckled. “A costume party. None of those are real. Almost all my training is in solving the problem _before_ people start shooting… besides, to use that many guns effectively, you need a five-man commando team. Which we have, but we try not to need them.”

“Does it happen often?”

“More often than I’d prefer. It means we screwed up, or there was something important we didn’t know going in.”

The computer binged.

“Do you have any other questions?” Holly asked. “If not, Sanders is ready for you now.”

Tricia took a deep breath and stood up. “What do I do?”

Holly pointed to the door behind her desk. “Go through there. Your bike will be outside. Turn left at the end of the driveway and keep going east till you reach the crossroads. Sanders will be waiting for you there.”

* * *

The door did not lead back into the city. Tricia stood at the entrance to a concrete bunker. Around her, desert stretched to the horizon. As Holly had promised, her bicycle was by her side. The “driveway” was a dirt track, leading to a two-lane paved road not very far from the bunker. She found herself, somehow, unsurprised.

The air was bone dry, but the sun was not especially hot. The desert plain was pink stone and red dirt, and the further Tricia went, the more life she saw. Tiny mice hopped through the dry grass by the side of the road. Tall spindly ocotillo, tiny fuzzy cacti, and bushy yucca grew everywhere. In the distance, dark birds (hawks?) soared on the wind. _It must be spring_ , she thought, seeing flowers on the ocotillo and the cactus.

The sun was nearly to the horizon when Tricia came to the crossroads of Highway 19 and Route 244 (as the signs had it), where a dusty pickup truck waited by the side of the road. A man was unloading some bright yellow barrels from the back of the truck, and as he straightened up with the last one, Tricia saw the horns on his head. He saw her just after, set the barrel down, and gave her an enthusiastic wave. “You must be Tricia!” he shouted. “Welcome to the Crossroads. I’m almost done setting up—please put your bike in the back of the truck while I finish with these barrels.”

Henry Sanders—“Call me Henry, please, we’re workin’ together”—had drawn an elaborate pattern in the dirt of a large bare patch next to the intersection of the roads. Wood was stacked for a bonfire in the center. Close to the edge of the pattern, on opposite sides of the center, were two small circles that looked like they were meant for a person to stand in. Each of those had a music stand and a folding table with a jug of water. Henry was arranging the barrels in a neat row of five, within one of these circles. The other one had no barrels, but it did have a second folding table with three carved gourds on it, and a wooden rack with seven silver handbells hanging from it.

When he was finished, he came back to the truck and sat with her on the tailgate. “We can’t start till the sun goes down,” he explained. “Meanwhile, I want to go over what we’ll be doing here. I’ll be doing almost all the singing and incanting and so on, but you do have a few lines—here’s the script.”

Tricia flipped through the short packet he’d given her. “Do I need to memorize this?”

“No, you can keep that. I’ve got my own copy. You’ll be over there with the barrels—the music stand is for the script—and all you have to do is say your lines when we come to them. Don’t worry about it if, for any reason, you can’t say a line precisely on cue. Nothing will go wrong, I’ll just wait till you can.”

“That doesn’t sound too hard.”

“Unfortunately, that was only the easiest bit. You were warned that this would be unpleasant, yes?”

“Um, yeah…”

“The first part of this ritual forces the entity that’s using you for its mouth to give back the souls of everyone it’s eaten. Magic being literal about this sort of thing, that means you will be doing a whole lot of throwing up. That’s what the barrels are for, and that’s why you might not be able to hit your lines precisely on schedule.”

“Five barrels’ worth of puke? I could sit in one of those with the lid on.”

“It’s not coming from your stomach any more than that dog went into it, eh? And I sincerely hope you won’t need more than two of them.”

Tricia shuddered. “That dog. I’m going to remember the look in that dog’s eyes forever. It knew what I was going to do and …”

One of Henry’s huge hands rested on her shoulder, for just a moment. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

She made herself smile a little. “It’s okay. Go on.”

“You can drink as much water as you want, the pitcher’s enchanted to refill itself. And I have some charms for you, they may help a bit.” He handed her another ring, equally plain but copper instead of steel, and a pair of nose plugs. “The ring will keep you clean of dirt, sweat, and so on. The plugs will turn off your sense of smell. They’ll also keep the vomit from going up the back of your nose, which is ow.”

She had to chuckle at that. “That does seem like it will help. Thanks… Holly said it would be emotionally unpleasant too?”

“Yeah. That probably won’t hit you till the second part, which summons the entity into this place and away from everywhere else it is. Through you. You will experience the entity’s thoughts and feelings—for as little time as I can manage, but it may _seem_ like an awfully long time from your perspective. And, well, what do you think is on its mind?”

She shivered. “It’s hungry. It’s never _not_ hungry, is it?”

He nodded. “In fact, at its core, hunger is what it _is_. But it’s not _just_ going to be hungry. It’s going to be boiling over with fury and hate for me—and for you, for defying its desire. And under that, I think, there will be fear. Terror. It doesn’t have much of a mind, I don’t think, but it has enough to know when its life is in danger.”

Her eyes got very wide. “And I’m going to feel all of that like it was my own. Just like the hunger.”

“That’s right. And this is the hardest thing I need you to do: I need you to _stay in that little circle_ , with your barrels and your music stand and your water jug, and not let the hunger or the rage or the terror budge you. If you can do that, I’m confident we will succeed, but if you leave the circle … we’ll probably both die.”

“… But no pressure,” she tried to joke.

At that, Henry grinned with all his teeth. “You know what black humor is for. You’re gonna be fine.”

“I thought that was pretty feeble,” she said.

“Well, that’s only to be expected, you’re new at this.”

“I suppose you do stuff like this all the time.”

“More often than I’d prefer.”

Tricia got a genuine smile out of that. “Holly said the same.”

“Holly is good people.” Henry looked over the circle, then toward the setting sun. “Just about showtime. Do you have any more questions?”

“Um, what are the bells for? They’re not in the script.”

“They’re in case things don’t go according to the script. I had to talk pretty fast to get them—they’re not my world’s magic at all, they’re incredibly dangerous, and I hope to God I don’t need them.”

“Yeesh. You’re scared to use them but you brought them anyway?”

“The worst thing that could happen because of them is not _remotely_ as bad as the worst thing that could happen because I needed them and didn’t have them.”

Tricia blinked at him. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

Henry shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. That’s my job. Anything else?”

“No. Let’s do this.”

* * *

As the sun slipped below the horizon, they lit the fire. By the time they were coming to the end of what the script called the “preliminary invocation”, it was burning steadily. Nothing uncanny had happened yet, and Tricia wondered at the phrasing of the magic. Didn’t magicians call on this or that for _power_? All that Henry was asking of anyone was that they _observe_.

“All who may be curious, watch and bear witness,” Henry declared.

She had a line now. “All who may be passing by, stop and bear witness.”

“All who we do mean to set free, stay and bear witness,” they said together, the last line. Henry threw one of his gourds into the fire; it burst, throwing sparks in all directions. As the sparks fell to the ground, the pattern he’d drawn in the dirt began to glow, a pleasant warm orange. Henry went on with the next part, a long chant in a language Tricia didn’t know. She let the rhythm of his words pass her by, and watched the fire and the darkness beyond the circle. In that darkness, it seemed to her, there _were_ observers, invisible but intent. Listening, watching, waiting…

“We call forth all who have been devoured!” Henry’s words, once again in plain English, hit her at exactly the same time as the first spasm of her stomach. The fit was upon her, wave after wave of vomit flooding from her mouth—the barrel was filling absurdly fast—she’d need to switch soon—and it ended as abruptly as it began.

Line, she had a line. Script? There. “We call them in the names of justice and mercy.” Was there going to be another fit? Not for the moment, it seemed.

Henry didn’t miss his cue. “We call them in the names of life and death.”

“In the name of the Great Wheel of Transmigrations.”

“And in the name of the one who set it spinning.”

“Come forth! Your torment is at an end!” they cried together—

— _now_ the vomiting again. This time there were no waves, there was no room for thoughts, there was only the barrel and the bile. She did not know how long it went on, she did not know how she managed to spill nothing or even how she managed to remain on her feet, but finally it was over. Henry had gone on meantime, another long chant in another language she didn’t know, and she took the chance to rinse her mouth and take a long drink from the pitcher. He saw her straighten up as he came to the end of his chant, caught her eye and smiled, and threw the second gourd on the fire. The sparks this time were a bright electric blue, and the pattern changed to match them, in a wave running outward from the fire. Tricia’s eyes followed the light to the edge of the circle, and so she noticed the blue-greenish phosphorescent faces in the darkness beyond. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Somehow she knew: these were the demon’s victims. Henry had conjured them out of her all too literally, and now, as they had been invited, they would bear witness to the demon’s end.

On the heels of that thought came the hunger. Not hers, she now knew, but the demon’s. All of its former meals had been taken from it, and it hungered as it never had before. She could eat them again, it occurred to her. She could run ravening through the darkness beyond the pattern. They could no more escape than any of the squirrels she remembered… or the dog… Thinking of the dog brought on another attack of vomiting, and she was almost glad of it, for it drove the hunger away.

Henry was waiting patiently in his own circle. _That’s right_ , she remembered, _I start the next bit._ She looked again at the script, then back at the fire, and in the firmest voice she could manage, cried: “We lift now the curses of the Devourer!”

“We lift them in the names of fate and chance!” Henry replied.

“We lift them in the names of—” It was not nausea or hunger that interrupted her, but rage, red blinding rage, the demon fighting to keep its habits and its co-opted daughters—she was not its only “mouth in the world”, she suddenly knew, there were dozens more, on dozens of worlds not quite her own… it would not give them up, it would not be forced to starve till it could grow more…

Tricia’s own fury came to her rescue. _I am nobody’s mouth! I am myself and my own!_ She raged inside herself so she would not rage outward, she clung to a barrel not to vomit but to keep still. Again she did not know how long it was, but at last the rage ebbed away, and she could finish her sentence:

“—of what has been and what will be.”

“In the name of the Garden of Endless Paths.” Henry didn’t look at all perturbed by the delay.

“And in the name of the one who tends its hedges.”

Together: “Be free of it! Your struggle is at an end.”

The demon’s fury rose in her mind again, but this time it was as if she watched someone _else_ rage; it was no longer in any way her own. She was free of it. She knew it, and the demon knew it too, and now she felt fear under the anger. Henry, opposite her, was for a moment a figure out of nightmare, a red horned face wreathed in flames (that’s only the bonfire, she reminded herself), come to take everything from her (no, from the demon); it wasn’t her fear anymore either, and yet she quailed at it, she wanted to flee into the night and never come back—

“Devourer! Stand forth and defend yourself.” Henry’s line cut across all her thoughts like a knife; she retched again, her mouth opening wide to expel something impossibly huge, a solid _thing_ which flew from her across the fire, toward Henry, who threw his last gourd without missing a beat. The fire spat up a pillar of red sparks just in time to catch the thing. It recoiled as if it had hit a solid wall, bounced back, hit another invisible wall on Tricia’s side, and came to a halt hanging in the air above the fire. The pattern glowed red now, and the faces beyond were red as well. She saw it clearly in that red light: a disgusting tangled ball of mouths and intestines and teeth, dripping ichor into the fire.

It screamed its fury and its hatred with all of those mouths: Tricia saw the air ripple with the force of that scream, but somehow her little circle (and Henry’s as well, she imagined) blocked most of the sound. Henry didn’t flinch; he _smiled_. “We are here to make an end of you.”

The thing screamed again; she heard defiance and disbelief, this time. Henry shrugged at it. “We already have. You are trapped here, outside time, without any mouths in the world. You will starve before the fire burns down. All we need do is wait.”

Another scream; the anger was giving way to fear, she thought, and it was not so much that it didn’t believe him as that it desperately did not want to.

“Perhaps we _should_ just wait. Perhaps that would be justice,” Henry continued, imperturbed as ever. The thing screamed more defiance and began to slam itself into the invisible barrier at the edge of the fire, again and again. Tricia thought she saw it give, bend towards Henry; she felt the power of the pattern crack…

Henry tapped the second-largest of his bells with the tip of one finger, just once. The bell-note was not loud, but before that insistent sound the thing fell silent, fell back to the center of the pattern, shrank and drooped in defeat. Henry looked almost sad. From his belt he drew what looked for all the world to be an ordinary revolver, and took careful aim.

“I did not come here to answer suffering with more suffering,” he said. “I have no mercy for you but death; I have no escape for you but the great Wheel. But know this: Your torment, as well, is at an end.”

Its final despairing scream was cut off by the report of Henry’s gun.

* * *

The next thing Tricia really noticed was that Henry was singing. She did not know the tune, or the words, but she caught enough of it to understand: it was a lament and farewell to the dead, assembled in the darkness around their circle. The pattern had turned from red to bright silvery white, and as Henry sang, the faces beyond began to move, spiraling in through the pattern and then up toward the stars. City born and raised, she had never seen such stars as she saw then: there was no moon, but she almost thought she could find her way back along the road by their brilliance, so clear was the night. The last of the dead faces vanished upward, a bright spark among millions; she stood and watched the night sky until Henry’s voice brought her back to herself:

“Tricia? How are you feeling?”

She blinked. Henry was standing just outside her little circle, holding a huge broom—it had been in the back of the truck, she remembered. The pattern’s glow had gone out; the fire had died down to dim red embers.

“It’s all over? We can go home?” she managed to mumble.

Henry put on a wry smile. “Not quite. Now I have to clean up. Are you up to helping any, or would you rather wait at the truck? I’ll drive us back afterward, it’s much too dark to be biking.”

“Um… I’m okay, I think. A little wobbly maybe. I was watching the stars.”

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they? Sometimes I come out here just to see them. They’re never this bright where I live.”

“Me either. Too much city light. …What needs doing?”

“I’ve already packed up my gear, so what’s left is to seal up the barrels and load all this stuff on the truck, put out the fire, and sweep up the pattern and the ashes.”

“I don’t think I can lift these barrels, but I could sweep?”

Henry nodded and held out the broom. “I’ll put out the fire now. You start at the outer edge of the pattern and sweep inward in a spiral. Make a pile of dust and ashes right where the fire was.”

It took her longer than she expected to sweep the entire pattern away, working by starlight, but by the time she was done she felt rather more herself. Henry scooped all the ashes into the last of the barrels, leaving nothing behind but bare dirt.

“What happens now?” Tricia asked, as they drove slowly back in the dark.

“The truck and the equipment go back into storage, the barrels go to hazmat disposal, we both spend a little time writing down everything that happened for the archives, and then you get to go home.”

“Huh. So simple? I’ve been living with this for years and now it’s _gone_ and I almost feel like I didn’t do anything to earn it.”

“No, you earned it. You had the strength to stand against everything that monster threw at you. You did what was needed, and you saved hundreds, maybe thousands of lives today. If you accomplish _nothing else_ in your life—and I think that unlikely—you will still leave the world a better place than you found it.”

“I couldn’t have done it alone, though. And you put yourself in just as much danger as I was, didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t have done it alone either. And it’s trite, but this is what I do, and what we just did was not the most dangerous thing I’ve done this year. …In the top five, yeah.”

Tricia snorted.

“Look, go home and think about it. I’ll give you my card, you can get in touch if you want to talk more about what happened; Holly will do the same. And if, after this has all had a chance to sink in, you still feel like you owe something… pay it forward. Help someone because you _can_. That’s what we’ve done for you, that’s all we ask of anyone.”

Tricia felt herself begin to smile. “All right. I can do that.”

Henry shot her a toothy grin as he pulled the truck into the bunker’s garage. “Good.”


	2. Deleted Expository Lump

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This got cut for messing up the flow of the main story, but if you’re curious about the underpinnings of the setting, here you go.

“That didn’t end quite the way I expected it to,” Tricia mentioned. “I’m not sure what I thought you would do, but it surely wasn’t to pull out a gun and _shoot_ it. Is it an enchanted gun or something?”

“Ha! No, no, it’s just a regular pistol, with regular lead bullets. That probably wouldn’t have worked at any other place or time, without the force of the entire ceremony behind it. But think about it this way. Magic runs on symbolism, yeah? Guns have been the main way people kill each other for hundreds of years. That makes them just about the most potent symbol of murderous intent you can find.”

Tricia thought about that a little. “It makes sense. Only if you’d asked me, I would’ve said that was swords.”

“Swords loom larger in the imagination, yeah, but guns’ve spilled a whole lot more blood. I might’ve brought a sword instead if this was more of a matter of justice, or vengeance—”

“—You were talking about justice there at the end?”

“Only to put it aside. It wasn’t _evil_ , see. I don’t know exactly how it got to _be_ the embodiment of mindless, desperate hunger—that’s not a thing the universe _needs_ —but it had no choice in its actions. I killed it because there was no other way to make it stop, not to punish it for what it had done.”

“Huh. Is that why Holly said the file said it wasn’t really a demon?”

“Right. Demons are by definition malicious and evil. We have good reason to think Hell doesn’t exist, but there _are_ plenty of supernatural beings that can reasonably be called demons... and that wasn’t one of them.”

“ ‘We’?”

“The organization. Problems Solved, if you like, though that’s just one aspect.”

“So who _are_ you guys really? I’d never heard of it before today, I only found the office by dumb luck.”

“We must’ve just expanded to your continuum then.” He paused, thinking. “There’s an infinite number of Earths, with different histories, different people, even slightly different physical laws.”

“Holly mentioned you came from a ‘parallel Earth.’ Um. When explaining about your horns.”

“Right. _My_ Earth has an unusually high range of variation in human body types. I have friends who are six inches tall and have wings. We also have lots of magic _and_ lots of technology, no extraterrestrial aliens, and our global political structure is dominated by corporations rather than nation-states. _Your_ Earth is probably quite different in at least one of those ways.”

“Yeah. Go on?”

“The organization started out as a small group of cross-dimensional explorers. Their goal was simply to see as much as they could and bring back as much knowledge as they could. After a while, they noticed that they were often in a position to help the people they met, because they’d learned something somewhere else that was helpful. So they started recruiting diplomats, teachers, and troubleshooters as well as explorers and scientists. A few centuries later, here we are.”

“Wow. How many worlds have they explored?”

“Thousands. The only limit we have found is our own imaginations. If you can dream it, it’s out there somewhere.”

“That reminds me—what did you mean, ‘outside time’? Time’s been passing, hasn’t it?”

Henry grinned at her. “You’re picking up on all the really important bits. I can’t explain it properly without a whole lot of math, but here’s a decent metaphor: Right now we’re not on any Earth at all. This desert isn’t a _where_ , it’s an _in between_. I brought us here because of that: it made what we just did a whole lot easier. But also, since it’s not a _where_ , it’s not a _when_ either. When we go back, it’ll be only a few minutes after you left.”

“Hmm. Then where do the roads go?”

“Theoretically they could go anywhere—and any when. Mostly, though, they seem to take you where you need to go. And they don’t help you get home again afterward, so we’ve not tried it much.”

“But we can get back to that bunker okay?”

“Yah, that’s still _in_ this in-between, see. We’d have to drive all the way to the end of the desert to leave it.”


End file.
